Palantir delivered blockbuster quarterly earnings on Monday that topped analyst estimates and sent CEO Alex Karp’s trademark ebullience into overdrive, even if the company’s stock didn’t follow along for the ride.
In a video interview a few hours ahead of Palantir’s earnings, Karp flailed his arms excitedly around as he spoke about the defense tech and AI software company’s results. “These numbers validate we were right. Please learn from us. That’s what these numbers mean,” Karp told Fortune in the interview.
“These are not normal results. These are not even strong results,” Karp continued later on Monday, during the company’s earnings call. “These aren’t extraordinary results. These are arguably the best results that any software company has ever delivered.”
After soaring roughly 400% over the past year, however, shares of Palantir took a time out on Monday despite the strong results. The stock initially rose after the earnings were released on Monday, according to Bloomberg, but then slid about 3.5% in after-hours trading.
Palantir posted third-quarter revenue of roughly $1.2 billion, up 63% from the year-ago period, and above the average analyst expectation of $1.09 billion, according to Bloomberg. The company’s $476 million in net income, was up 40 percent year-over-year. While Palantir’s government contracts business remains strong, business from U.S. commercial customers drove the company’s growth in the third quarter, expanding by 121% year-over-year to $397 million.
Karp described the numbers on Monday’s earnings call as more akin to a venture-backed company than a public one, highlighting the “Rule of Forty” metric in Palantir’s quarterly earnings deck, which is a financial metric calculated by combining the year-over-year revenue growth rate and adjusted operating margin. In general, 40% is considered strong performance. This quarter, Palantir’s “Rule of Forty” was 114%, even higher than its last quarter, which was 94%.
Palantir’s revenue figures are still quite small compared to peers of similar market capitalization. And the company’s rich valuation has stoked skepticism among some investors worried about an AI bubble. Regulatory filings from Monday reveal that Michael Burry, the esteemed short seller known for his big bet against the subprime mortgage market in 2008, has taken out a short position in both Palantir and NVIDIA. Palantir and NVIDIA last week announced that they had struck a partnership, where Palantir will combine NVIDIA chips and software with its tech platform for some of its customers. Palantir said last week that home improvement retailer Lowe’s was already incorporating this into its tech stack, but the software company declined on Monday to share other companies that had rolled that out.
True to form, Karp delved into a couple touchy subjects on Monday’s earnings call, including the Administration’s recent focus on drug traffickers in South America.
“Let me say something slightly political,” Karp said. “And I’m not saying other people agree with this, but when people are attacking our soldiers for stopping fentanyl from coming into this country, I want people to remember if fentanyl was killing 60,000 Yale grads instead of 60,000 working class people, we’d be dropping a nuclear bomb on whoever was sending it from South America.”
Karp’s shareholder letter from this quarter—his fifteenth musing to shareholders and Palantir enthusiasts—was also biting. In the letter, Karp suggested that there had been a “rejection of any shared and defined sense of common culture, in this nation and others,” and that this “has had significant costs.”
But more than anything, Karp seemed to revel in the numbers themselves—and rubbing them in the faces of those he says have perhaps been too skeptical.
“Some of our detractors have been left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement,” he wrote in the letter, before going on to reference a British film director and later the poet William Butler Yeats.
